June Is Busting Out All Over

No, I’ve not got a part in Carousel. It just seemed like a great title for the first post in June especially since I’ve been a busy bunny over the last few days as you can probably see.

We’ve got a new theme, I’ve installed a couple of new plugins including one which will directly benefit you and I’ve updated some of the old features on here.

Curious to find out more?

First things first. I’ve revamped the theme as you can see. The old style was kinda based on how Technorati used to look. Well, as you probably know, they’ve recently made some changes to their site so I thought it was time to have a bit of a change myself. It’s still based on the excellent Cutline theme by Chris Pearson but I’ve just made a few tweaks in the background so that it fits in more with what I’m trying to do. I wanted to retain elements of the old style (i.e. lots of whitespace) as well as making it look a bit sleeker.

What do you think? Do you like it? Do you hate it? I tell you what, why not leave a comment?

Which leads me nicely on to the next change. I’ve installed the DoFollow WordPress plugin by Semiologic. In case you didn’t know, WordPress by default adds the “nofollow” rule to any URLs in comments. This is a bad thing because it means that there’s no flow of Google juice whenever you leave a comment. I think that people should be rewarded for leaving comments so, on the advice of Andy Beard and Lyndon Antcliff, I’ve installed this spiffy new plugin. As a result I’ve also put into place a comment policy which I suggest you have a read of.

Next up I’ve changed the permalink structure for the site to something a little bit more search engine friendly. Previously I was using one of the default options which included date information in the URL. It didn’t look pretty and wasn’t really helping me search wise so, taking on board what Michael Gray suggested in his excellent Make WordPress Search Engine Friendly video along with his post SEO Plugins For WordPress, I’ve cut out all the fluff in the URLs and installed the Permalink Redirect WordPress plugin. The reason for the plugin is because changing the permalink structure would have meant that any old links didn’t work any more. Now I could have hard coded the .htaccess file to point the old URLs to the new structure but that would have taken ages and there was a chance I could screw things up. The plugin takes care of all of that and is something that I highly recommend it.

I’ve made some changes to the About page so that it’s more up to date than the old one. I’ve even included one of my cheesy publicity photos for you to print out and throw darts at! I’m also in the process of writing the Resources page. Hopefully it’ll be finished in the next couple of days and will contain a number of the links that used to be in the sidebar as well as pointing you to some useful resources. Hence the name of the page. No, really.

So there you go. Now you can see why June is busting out all over Twenty Steps! I hope that the changes will make the site more useful to you and I’d love to hear your feedback.

UPDATE: I forgot to thank RT Cunningham for reminding me about the permalink redirect plugin. RT is a recent addition to my RSS reader but he writes in a way that makes me feel like I’ve known him for years.

10 responses so far ↓

Glad to hear the spam counter hasn’t been working overtime since the switch! Thanks again for spurring me on to make the switch. I’d been looking at manually changing the WordPress files so when I saw the plugin on your site I had no reason not to put it in place.

Wow, sounds like you’ve made some really positive changes behind the scenes, in addition to the new theme. Thanks for the invitation to have a look-see – I was flattered. I can honestly say it looks great. Very clean, which I’m always partial to. I like the favicon also. 😉 We must be like-minded individuals, because I launched a refresh of my own site yesterday as well! Anyway great job.

I’ve been reading your site all day, and going back and forth cleaning my site up and using a lot of your SEO tips. One of favorites was simplifying my permalinks, really great idea and much cleaner but I was always afraid to do it because of the possible broken links on old posts.

I found the permalink redirect plugin you recommended and it worked perfectly, but here’s a little brain teaser for you if you know a way to solve this using .htaccess or any other way:

Wow, haha, this post went on longer than I thought, and it may not even make it through your spam filters, but if you can understand what I’m rambling on about and have any suggestions, it would be a great help.

Yup – it hit the spam filter alright…Just as well I manually check the gazillions of spam messages I get and found you.

I’m in a benevolent mood since it’s 2am and I’ve had a beer so won’t stick a pink condom on the links either…

As far as I can see, all of the above links work fine so either

a) you’ve fixed it with a 301 in your .htaccess or
b) you didn’t clear your cache before checking your site.

Provided you enter the correct permalink structure into the plugin, you should face no problems with the redirects. It automatically 301’s the old URL structure to whatever you entered in the WP admin console.